PagedLife

Bidvertiser is the next Ad Network we will review. At first glance, Bidvertiser looks very similar to Google Adsense. They also pay 30 days after you cash out, but this is where the similarities stop. Bidvertiser has a minimum payout of $10 via PayPal, a lot less then the $100 minimum of Adsense, but they do not tell what percentage of your earnings they keep.

Bidvertiser ads come in a variety of ads, and you have the ability to change the colors on these ads to fit in with your site design. The layout of there control panel is a little awkward, and there is not a lot of help on there site to assist you with building these ads, but once you start looking around it becomes fairly easy. It also seems relatively easy to be accepted into there publisher network.

One great feature of Bidvertiser is that they accept sites with little to no content, and also sites that are entirely flash based. They also base the price per click you get on the popularity of your website, so if you have a very popular site you can earn much more per click. They do this by allowing advertisers to bid on a PPC basis for your adspace. You can also filter the ads they are displayed on your site.

Pros:

• Sites with little to no content accepted.
• Flashed based sites accepted.
• Popular sites receive higher PPC.
• Can integrate with your sites design.
• $10 minimum payout.

Cons:

• Control Panel is awkward.
• 30 day payout time.

Here are some sample ads(top also):

The next advertising network we are showcasing is ProjectWonderful. ProjectWonderful truly is wonderful. They have a very simple and easy setup process and they do not rely on clicks or impressions, although both of these are monitored and made available to potential advertisers.

The advertisers bid on having your ad spot for 24 hour periods and pay whatever the going rate is, and if someone out bids an advertiser, the advertiser still pays for the minutes their ad runs. You also have the option of starting the bidding at whatever price you would like per day, including a starting price of $0.00. Setting the starting price of free gives you the opportunity to have the "Place your ad here" turn into a real ad to become more appealing on your site. You can also change the default "Place your ad here" logo to your own ad or image.

There are various sizes of ads from 117x30 to 728x90 and 160x600. Ads can be shown in buttons, squares, vertically or horizontally. Ads can also be grouped in multiples of rows and columns.

While it might not make you a millionaire, I think the setup at Project Wonderful is a great source of revenue for both big and small sites. If there are any spots in my ads without bids, feel free to bid $0.00 and have your ad up for free!

Pros:

• Easy to use and setup.
• You get paid regardless of impressions or clicks.
• Ads can get bid up quite a bit.
• You have the option of approving or denying ads.
• Minimum payout is $10.

Cons:

• Project Wonderful takes 25%.

Here is a sample ad in a 2x2 block of 125x125 ads, in a small space this creates 4 different ads all bringing in daily revenue:

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

Google has shown a Strong love for blogs since the very beginning, and on some Blogs Adsense works very well.

Google Adsense offers a range of ads including Adsense for Content which generates relevant ads based on your site content, Adsense for Search which creates a search option on your site showing both results from your site and paid results, Referrals for a range of products including Google Adsense, Video Units from YouTube, and even Adsense for Mobile Content.

Adsense also offers both CPM(Cost Per Mille) and CPC(Cost Per Click) ads, meaning you can choose to get paid by how many clicks you get, or how many thousands of impressions you give. Adsense allows you to create custom "channels" for reporting purposes, to keep track of which ads are generating more revenue, and generate reports on Impressions, CTR(Click Through Rate) and estimated CPM. You can also setup a competitive ad filter to filter out any ads that may be in direct competition with your services. Through site Authentication you can also setup Adsense ads to display relevant ads in member only areas.

The ads created can be any a variety of sizes from 120x90 to 728x90 and 120x600 available in horizontal, vertical and square. All of these ads are also able to be integrated almost perfectly into your site by modifying the colors of all elements in the ad.

Adsense seems to be the standard in the ad industry. Everyone uses it and even if your not using Adsense on your site, a lot of sites are now offering revenue sharing so you can plug your adsense code in and share in the ad revenue.

Pros:

• Adsense is the standard.
• Easily approved.
• Reliable well established company.
• Integrates very well into your existing design.
• Good revenue on a CPC basis with some high paying keywords.
• Ads relevant to your content.
• Will allow you to have other ads on your site.

Cons:

• Must have a minimum $100 payment.
• Paid at the end of the next month.
• Strict policies which can seemingly ban you for no reason.

Here are some working ads from Google Adsense(including the Adsense referral at the top of this post):

Adsense for Content:

Adsense Search:

Tomorrow I will be reviewing another revenue source, ProjectWonderful

Recently I was denied acceptance to text-link-ads.com because my blog "does not have strong enough traffic". I believe they are probably going off of Alexa for this information as I am now getting a strong 100-200 daily unique hit count. I never really liked text-link-ads.com anyways, there site is poorly designed, there tools have been down for a year or more, and there staff is slow and inadequate.

I was not going to put up ads as of yet, I just wanted to play around with there plugins and research it a little. This poor experience with text-link-ads made me decide to showcase different ways of monetizing our blogs. Each day, starting tomorrow, I will showcase a different way of monetizing a blog, explain in details the ad types, and discuss the pro's and con's of each. I will also include a sample ad for each within the posts.

And now for some comment bait:

How do you prefer to monetize your site, and why?

There is a lot of buzz around Entrecard and its benefits and its downfalls. A lot of people sign up to become part of a community, for interaction with other like minded bloggers, and to find new friends. Even more people sign up just to drive traffic to their blogs, and a lot of people question the quality of traffic they receive. I have read many bloggers complaining about the traffic, the waste of valuable advertising space, and the bounce rate they receive from Entrecard.

I just signed up for Entrecard three days ago, and I have been interacting with the community, monitoring how much I put into the service and how much it gives back, and examining the traffic I do receive from them. Overall it has been a fun and informative experience, and I have found a few new blogs that I really do enjoy.

The last two days I have received 15 hits each day from Entrecard, and the bounce rate has been 88.46%. I am sure many of these people are just coming to drop there card and receive more EC credits, but some of them are staying and looking around. As far as people complaining about the bounce rate, my opinion is that any traffic is good traffic, and I look at the bright side, 11.54% of the people are staying and looking around! My blog is also coming back from a period of hibernation, so right now the majority of my traffic is bounced, although it doesn't have quite the bounce rate as Entrecard referrals have. As a comparison though, my bounce rate from Stumbleupon is near 90%.

In regards to the wasted ad space, for me I wanted to wait awhile before I monetized my blog, and the number of readers I have now are not sufficient to make monetization an issue. Instead of looking at it as ad space, I think people should look at it as a link to a community portal, a community the should actively belong to and try and participate in to make it better. Besides, if its that big of an issue, put the Entrecard at the bottom of your blog pages, we can always make the pager longer! ;)

Over all I am happy with the experience, and although I don't think I will get a lot of traffic or readers from being a part of the program, I still like being part of the community, and the few readers I do get from Entrecard are worth having the badge on the side and being a part of something bigger!

Smashing Magazine puts together yet another great list of well-designed blogs. Very inspirational and some really unique designs made the cut.

read more | digg story

Edit: This post was made from using Digg's 'Blog it' feature. Normally I will not add content like this, but the designs showcased in this blog are excellent and I felt that people would benefit from seeing the creativity and idea's that went behind designing some of these blogs. Click 'read more' and check it out!

I want to tell everybody about the new service I found today called Jott. Jott has the ability to dictate messages over the phone and E-mail them or post them to your blog. I'm currently driving home in my car talking on my cell phone and writing this blog entry. Jott seems to be a great program and I'm testing this out for the first time. When I get home I will edit this entry and have a links for the Jott homepage along with the scree shot, but so far the service seems great. listen

Powered by Jott

Edit: This was my very first time using Jott, and as you can see from the above post it did very well. You can even listen to my dictation with the listen link. The only problem I saw was it mispelled "screen" as "scree".

It is actually a little harder then I thought to blog in traffic, but Jott actually makes blogging in traffic a reality. Jott allows you to dictate a message and email it, or send it to different services like wordpress. This would be a wonderful tool to be able to Blog while at conventions, or to do interviews with people for your blog. I won't be using it for every blog post, but I will definitely be using Jott again in the future.

I also found out that it takes the first line and truncates it to use as the Title of your post or Subject of your email. Overall I think Jott did very well for my first time using it!

I found another very useful online tool today called Kwout. Kwout allows you to take a screenshot of any website by using its URL and it will maintain an image map with clickable links for the actual links on the website. You can even crop the screenshot! Here is a sample of a screenshot of there homepage, and notice that the "FireFox Addon" link is clickable from within the screenshot!

Since my Blog was down for so long I have lost a lot of traffic and all of my PageRank. This drove me to search for free directories so I could submit PagedLife and raise my PR and SERPs resulting in more traffic hopefully.

In my search I ran across a page on vmoptions.com with a huge Free Directory List. You can sort the list by PR or date added, and it makes your job MUCH easier when looking for good free SEO friendly web directories. I started to submit PagedLife to a bunch today, and I figured I'll start submitting to maybe 5-10 a night casually for the next few days.

Give it a try, spend 10 minutes a night submitting to Free Directories, all it can do is help your PR and SERPs!

Leave a comment if you have some good Free Directories that are not on that list!

Many of you know my main business is Think411.com my web hosting company, the same servers that PagedLife resides. I have decided to try and monetize some additional services and have opened up several free services.

I have recently opened up IMG.gd a Free Image Host and Host.gd a Free Web Host. IMG.gd is currently monetized with only ads on the first page and Host.gd is not monetized at all, I decided I did not want to force ads on the free hosting clients.

I did however find a way to monetize Host.gd without producing ads on any clients pages, and without ads on the site at all. This method could be deployed in either a White Hat, Grey Hat or Black Hat method and so far is doing quite well.

I opened Host.gd about a week ago, and with very little promotion (only promoted on DP and WebHostingTalk) I have only gained 19 clients, some from search engines. Even if I decided I wanted to force ads, with this little amount of free hosting clients I would not be making anything at all.

Originally I was going to sell Host.gd on Digital Point, however I recently found found a new way to monetize the site, and the first day I made $1.20 and today, the second day of monetizing the site I made $2.16!

I am currently doing this in a White Hat way using adsense and it is working very good, I am going to continue testing this and if all goes well I may write an eBook on this method and sell it as I have not seen this idea anywhere. This method could easily be used in a White Hat, Grey Hat or Black Hat method and I think would do very good in all three ways for free webhosts.

This method is so simple and so perfect I can not believe no one has tried this. It does not affect the clients at all and does not break any adsense rules.

I may give more details in the coming days, currently I want to test this for some time and see if the results stay constant.

Has anyone else come across incredible ways to monetize there sites without affecting the end users in anyway?